Environmental Justice Curriculum Collaboration
In spring of 2022, the University of Oregon Environment Initiative (EI) awarded a faculty fellowship to Sarah Stapleton, an assistant professor in the College of Education.
Funded by the Office of the Provost, the Faculty Fellows Program aims to enhance transdisciplinary research and advance the EI’s strategic priorities as articulated by its Guiding Principles. Faculty fellows complete a project that aligns with the EI’s goal of leveraging environmental research and education toward social and environmental justice.
December 15, 2022
For her project, Professor Stapleton recruited a team of Oregon teachers to work together with local environmental justice organization Beyond Toxics to create and implement an interdisciplinary, environmental justice high school curriculum.
From the beginning, Professor Stapleton prioritized community partnership. She collaborated with Lisa Arkin, Executive Director at Beyond Toxics, to consider how they might convert Beyond Toxics’ community health data and advocacy into curriculum. Stapleton and Arkin decided to commence the curriculum project where Beyond Toxics began: exploring environmental injustices occurring in the organization’s own backyard in West Eugene.
Stapleton and Arkin co-wrote a grant proposal and were awarded $25,000 by the Gray Family Foundation to fund a teachers’ curriculum-writing retreat.
In June 2022, Stapleton and Arkin hosted the teachers’ retreat in Lincoln City, Oregon. The all-star team included two Beyond Toxics staff, three social studies educators, three science teachers, and Stapleton. The group worked tirelessly throughout the week-long retreat, which involved significant transdisciplinary collaboration.
“During the curriculum development retreat, the teacher-EJ advocates team worked closely to unwrap the possibilities of environmental justice as an entry point for a number of core subjects,” reflects Arkin. “The deeper we dug into Beyond Toxics’ community-based research in West Eugene, the more we discovered the applicability of the material to both science and humanities curricula.”
By week’s end, the social studies team had designed an educational activity reflecting the perspectives and experiences of diverse members of the West Eugene community. Additionally, the science team laid the foundation for a unit on West Eugene environmental injustices, incorporating multiple lessons for secondary biology, chemistry, and environmental sciences.
In late October 2022, the science team hosted a curriculum workshop at the Northwest Teaching for Social Justice conference. This workshop brought nearly two dozen educators together to discuss and practice environmental justice education and debut the curriculum.
In early November, Kelly Ferguson, a member of the curriculum team who earned her masters in teaching at UO, introduced the science team’s new curriculum to her students at Kalapuya High School. Along with attending school in West Eugene, most—if not all—of Ferguson’s students live in the area, making them particularly motivated to engage the new, regionally specific science curriculum as a tool for better understanding and defining their own environmental justice experiences.
Piloting the curriculum in West Eugene while grounding it in local environmental justice concerns was a purposeful decision, explains Ferguson. “My students who are piloting this curriculum are disproportionately affected by Environmental Justice issues, as they live in a zip code that is directly and negatively impacted by industrialization more than other [areas] around it, a community whose origins are deeply connected to the relocation of black communities from Ferry [Street] Bridge in the 1940s,” she says. “[T]hese students’ voices will make a powerful statement.”
Indeed, feedback from Ferguson’s students, as well as her experience leading them through the new unit, will guide the science team as they refine the curriculum before making it freely available to high school educators across Oregon. In the meantime, the science team is researching social and emotional dimensions of learning and teaching about environmental justice as they arise in the piloting of their curriculum.
Looking toward the future of this project and still prioritizing community partnership, Professor Stapleton also plans to facilitate the development of curricula informed by Beyond Toxics’ activism supporting Oregon farmworkers. This work will include another curriculum writing series led in collaboration with Beyond Toxics.
The incredible outcomes and potential of Professor Stapleton’s collaboration with Beyond Toxics and local educators to create and implement multidisciplinary environmental justice curriculum in West Eugene public high schools demonstrate the value of the EI’s Faculty Fellows Program. Galvanized by her partnerships within our community, Professor Stapleton has facilitated tangible advancement in environmental and social justice education. With more opportunities to explore regional environmental justice issues and experiences in their core courses, students across Oregon can become better equipped to act as leaders and problem solvers.
